Many companies use a personal email address (e.g. john.companyname@gmail.com) for work purposes. But does a free email address give the right impression for your business?

Enhancing your email address by giving it the same domain name as your website (e.g. john@companyname.com) is relatively easy to do and has many benefits;

It makes you look professional and it can make a small business look larger than it is. This can reinforce the quality of your product.

Professionally hosted email services are more secure from data breaches - especially important with the new Australian data privacy rules coming in March 2014.

Your email is more likely to be delivered, read and opened. Free email addresses are much more likely to be misidentified as spam.

While there are a number of professional email services on the market, one that stands out is “Google Apps for Business”. Google Apps has many useful features, including helping you and your team connect by allowing group email addresses such as team@ or exec@, allows detailed security options for your documents, calendar and can be set up to perform mailbox delegation for your Personal Assistant. You can also access your emails from anywhere in the world on nearly any device and harness the power of Google search in your email.

Google Apps for Business also provides 30GB of storage for your email and documents, and comes with 24/7 support a serious plus for serious business owners.

You can upgrade to Google Apps here (link) or with assistance from a Google Authorised Reseller (contact us for more details).

Google Apps for Business is USD $5/user/month, and can be setup for 1 user or 1,000’s.